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My son just purchased FIFA16 it was considered a need vs a want, on the basis that his cohort of friends are all upgrading, a self fulfilling prophecy of course or confusion between cause and effect.

The sad reality of many months of dutiful work and development of his squad and the investment i coin and points to build his team in FIFA 15, all that is now gone in FIFA 16. Imagine if that was how the premiership worked!!!. Well it does when it comes to new kit of course, creating the demand from children of all ages and a tax on parents.

I wonder if EA sports “it’s in the game” or rather “it’s in the money we can make off kids” reflected about matters a little they could come up with a business model that respected loyalty and encouraged investment by young people. They could charge more per player or cost of coins and points but may the asset base of players and experience move forward across each release of the game. The game itself would then be about improving features and functions instead of a shameless monetisation agenda with some lipstick added to the core game.

The kids have already worked it out and called it a swizzzzzz.

Come on EA Sports think about allowing upgrades and transfer from one version of the game to the next or let them sell off their players and transfer the cash over

I don’t know about you but I am beginning to wonder about Apple and its approach to UX design.

iTunes and ios Music

The latest implementations of music and itunes are a backward step for me personally. I find it hard to do what i want to do and find what I wan to find. It seems more designed to push their products and services and not help me listen to music and find what I am looking for.

Email

The search features are weak. I use gmail natively and when I search for an email it is found in seconds, the search on the native email client on ios is poor rarely makes a match and brings up lots of false matches

Fingerprint recognition vs password for iTunes

Well I have chosen the convenience of using my fingerprint notwithstanding the issues of NSA and Apple having a record of these because I do but the reality is for some reason it keeps asking me for my AppleID password at strange times especially of course at the most inconvenient time and it causes frustration.

So Apple what is happening over there, Billions in the bank, new products, new features all the time, but the legendary design crown is slipping especially on software UX

Some times people get it just right don’t they. Today in parliament select committee one of the potentially biggest abuses of our personal rights and our personal data, some of the most sensitive information about ourselves was discussed fully and frankly and the NHS in England and the HSCIC were found wanting. I have never seen so many witnesses lined up with consistent real concerns so clearly presented to a committee, not a committee so engaged and insightful on a major issue only to find those whose job it is to protect, support and manage this asset of us as individuals to be found wanting

Let us hope that we will see a radical policy shift that places personal control over personal data in the hands of the individual regardless of the education programme needed to get people to participate. This will be better for individuals, better for the NHS and better for research and better for the economy. As Chris Graham the Information Commissioner says we have got to stop brushing the offer under the carpet and let people know what is going on and what there will be used for an let them decide in an informed consent model based on digital consent being granted and not keep us consigned to the paper world whilst the data is harvested at the speed of light from GP’s into the mother of all Big Data warehouses and made available to people unknown for unknown purposes.

By the way
I want to support research that will help the world
I want to be able to share my health records or bits of them that need them

I just do not want it done to me without my consent or active participation.
I want improved outcomes for the nations health and yes £93bn of public money funds the health services in the UK each year, if we can dramatically reduce the cost of delivery and improve the quality of diagnosis, prescribing, improve the quality of care and streamline processes I am up for it, but I want to be involved and I do not want it funded by some secret sponsorship deal or some cost offset deal created by the drug and life and pension and health insurance companies and the digital data barons at Google, Apple, Facebook etc in return for some claimed boost to UK plc coffers around inward investment.

Its nearly inaccessible – the use of plastic to wrap products is causing injury as people try to access the product they purchased and the type of plastic is sharp and hard to open, it is also in a lot of cases is not recycleable, so you cut your hands to shreds, you clutter up your waste bins with things that go to landfill

The instructions and safety are wasteful of paper all in the name of globalisation and compliance – Have you ever bought a product where the regulatory notice and the instructions actually take up more space than the product itself, no one reads them and the actual information you want to have gone on a single plastic credit card sized piece of paper. so who is it helping and how does it save the planet or deliver a good experience for the consumer, in short it does not it in some twisted way is the bean counters and manufacturing managers who think it is a good because they have a common product they send out across the world.

Power supply cables – Because we cannot agree standards, we end up with nearly a meter of copper cable we through away everytime as we do not need it as it for a different country. What does a copper three core wound cable cost and if you sell a million products its a million meters of cable that ends up in the bin or a cupboard for two years before it ends up in the bin

Font size on the side of tins and packets – You now need an electron microscope or at least a magnifying glass to read the information on the side of tins, packets and other products. Why?, is it a desire to be regulatory compliant first and not consumer centric first. People do want to know what to do but it is lost in all the other information that regulators now say need to be provided to be legally compliant. but no one reads it do they.

So what are the common themes here

Regulatory compliance trumps being customer centric

Customer experience is considered secondary to convenience for retailers in terms of packaging

Now lets be clear some people do try to do better. Amazon use cardboard for their packaging, it is recycleable, it is cheap and it is based on recycle material. I know I give them a hard time for so many other failings but they get this largely correct even if the reason they do is it is cheapest option with a brand carry on environmentally responsible, corporate social responsibility as a spin off benefit

If you look at clothes retailers they use plastic which cannot be recycled but is waterproof. Big retailers of electrical products are simply demanding packaging that goes on a display unit easily and no consideration is being made for the waste of natural resources.

Here is an example: I got three memory sticks the size of a domino each from Amazon. They arrived in a cardboard box on a cardboard display pack with a plastic built in. I saved petrol by having them posted, bought at a cheaper price than in store by 30% and also got free delivery.

So is there someone out there doing the maths, how much natural resource are we wasting in terms of

plastics of many types

copper cable

distribution costs due to space wasted

medical supplies repairing the damage caused by packaging

land fill for things that cannot be replaced

Should we be asking ourselves

How many pence in every pound we spend

How much time do we waste a year dealing with poor packaging

How much stress does poor packaging cost

How did the madness of bean counters and manufacturing managers become more important than the environment and the customer.

I just used the really simple tool FaxYour GP to opt out of sharing my medical records held by the NHS. Took only two minutes to do versus the cumbersome diversionary and hard to use process the NHS created to make it as hard as possible for you to opt-out. Thanks med confidential for point me to the service

Happy to have donated to your voluntary teams resources with a small donation. Keep up the good work, lets hope you get more supporters and grants to help you fight to keep our health records safe

Fantastic achievement as announced this week but clear it is not over a 6 month stay of execution on wholesale sharing of our medical records, which must not happen without informed and active consent and only when we are in control over the process, not being brushed under the carpet.

Why not simply make the individual the point of integration and sharing and stop the build up of giant data warehouses of medical records, simples